LETTER FROM LONDON SEPTEMBER 2015

Laughter In The Dark 


It has been alleged that, as part of a student initiation ceremony, the British Prime Minister placed his penis into the mouth of a dead pig. We are consequently now all engulfed in Pig-Gate,- and surely we have now reached the stage when for a whole generation there must be puzzlement as to why the suffix ‘gate’ has to be attached to every political scandal.

In a short story I once wrote something to the effect that bananas are inherently funny. The same, for obscure reason, is also true of pigs. Twitter was made for just such a moment and now you cannot move for pig puns, admittedly having provided more than my fair share of them myself. The head grows dizzy with a constant play on words, hog, pig, pork and porky; and so we descend collectively to the playground world of eleven year old's sharing smutty jokes. All great fun at the expense of a privileged group, born to rule and to ignore the rules which are never intended to be observed by the likes of them.
People have expressed surprise that of all Newspapers it is The Daily Mail, a paper that supports the Conservative Party, that has published this salacious gossip targeted at David Cameron. I am not, for the Daily Mail is not conservative but reactionary and the story plays into its highly cynical anti-politics agenda. Interestingly Ashcroft’s chosen conduit to pour out his carefully accumulated bile is the truly repellent Isabel Oakeshott, a ‘journalist’ happy to drop her sources in the manure to save her own skin.
Isabel Oakeshott
If it is true that Cameron smoked cannabis while a student, and it sound highly probable, then it provides one more Lego brick of hypocrisy in the unstable incoherent and ambiguous structure that represents British drug laws. In truth the privileged cocaine sniffers and inhalers of good quality Moroccan hashish do not think it safe to allow the oiks to play with such substances.
It seems that much hilarity has been caused by the fact that it is alleged that Cameron was listening to Supertramp whilst partaking of the wacky baccy.   Why the sudden snootiness about Supertramp? I liked/like some of the bands material, indeed ‘Breakfast in America’ is a great album. True they produced some dross, few bands ever dodge that bullet, and anyone who produces a lyric like “come on you little fighter, no need to get uptighter…” is pushing at the boundaries of what is acceptable. The odd thing is Supertramp were a seventies band and Cameron was a student at Oxford in the mid-eighties, so that the music he was listening to was already fading rapidly into that most distant of all periods, the recent past. Nothing wrong with this of itself, only it somehow fits an image of Cameron desperately seeking to be cool, to be in the loop, but always falling short. Not that this has made him suffer in any significant way, his privilege has always cushioned him against hardship, only wanting to be liked is always a symptom of poverty of ambition. This might seem a strange thing to say of someone who eventually became Prime Minister. However why did he want to be PM, because, as he said, he thought that he ‘would be good at it.’  No vision, no compelling passion, no drive to make the world a better place, just a desire to prove himself a competent manager. My Lord I rest my case.
David Cameron 

All this while the ongoing saga of Corbyn’s astonishing victory in the leadership election, and his performance as Leader of the Opposition, which wobbles between tragedy and farce, has played out. Apparently the new Shadow Secretary for Agriculture, is not keen on meat eaters, believing that they should be segregated and shamed, in exactly the same way as smokers currently are. That should go down well in rural areas. Meanwhile Saudi Arabia now heads the UN Human Rights Council and satirists the world over hurl themselves from high buildings. Laugh, I cannot stop crying.
Of course all this is laughter in the dark helping to keep grim reality at bay…

AT
September 2015

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